BitTorrent Goes Trackerless: Publishing with BitTorrent gets easier!

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Robert J. Berger" <rberger () ibd com>
Date: May 19, 2005 3:10:14 PM EDT
To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Cc: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: BitTorrent Goes Trackerless: Publishing with BitTorrent gets  
easier!


[This should make BitTorrent even more popular and have more "Legal"  
applicaitons. - Rob]

BitTorrent Goes Trackerless: Publishing with BitTorrent gets easier!
http://www.bittorrent.com/trackerless.html

As part of our ongoing efforts to make publishing files on the Web
painless and disruptively cheap, BitTorrent has released a
'trackerless' version of BitTorrent in a new release.

Suppose you bought a television station, you could broadcast your
progamming to everyone in a 50 mile radius. Now suppose the population
of your town tripled. How much more does it cost you to broadcast to 3
times as many people? Nothing. The same is not true of the Web. If you
own a website and you publish your latest video on it, as popularity
increases, so does your bandwidth bill! Sometimes by a lot! However,
thanks to BitTorrent the website owner gets almost near-broadcast
economics on the web by harnessing the unused upstream bandwidth of
his/her users.

In prior versions of BitTorrent, publishing was a 3 step process. You
would:

   Create a ".torrent" file -- a summary of your file which you can
   put on your blog or website

   Create a "tracker" for that file on your webserver so that your
   downloaders can find each other

   Create a "seed" copy of your download so that your first downloader
   has a place to download from

Many of you have blogs and websites, but dont have the resources to
set up a tracker. In the new version, we've created an optional
'trackerless' method of publication. Anyone with a website and an
Internet connection can host a BitTorrent download!

While it is called trackerless, in practice it makes every client a
lightweight tracker. A clever protocol, based on a Kademlia
distributed hash table or "DHT", allows clients to efficiently store
and retrieve contact information for peers in a torrent.

When generating a torrent, you can choose to utilize the trackerless
system or a traditional dedicated tracker. A dedicated tracker allows
you to collect statistics about downloads and gives you a measure of
control over the reliability of downloads. The trackerless system
makes no guarantees to reliability but requires no resources of the
publisher. The trackerless system is not consulted when downloading a
traditionally tracked torrent.

Although still in Beta release, the trackerless version of BitTorrent,
and the latest production version are available at
http://www.bittorrent.com/

---
Robert J. Berger - Internet Bandwidth Development, LLC.
Voice: 408-882-4755 eFax: +1-408-490-2868
http://www.ibd.com


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